


The Unicorn

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Team Fortress 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-10 18:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3299363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"i had this terrible nightmare i wrote a team fortress 2/the last unicorn crossover"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood and she lived all alone.

A matriarch of animals, a drop of the mercurial moonstuff, an earthly vehicle of the satisfied gasp of summer, she was ancient, wild and wonderfully beautiful -- the careless color of seafoam, her feet which she tread upon like light on a riverbed were extremely small, her neck very narrow and very long, rather like a swans -- above her eyes, which were enormous and utterly black, grew a horn which shone and shivered with its own seashell light.

In the wood she possessed it was always spring, for as a lantern pours out light a unicorn bestows a little of her immortality upon every place she passes. The animals of the land were tamed by her, playing peacefully together beneath her feet -- the water here was sweeter, the soil better, the wind warmer, the grasses good and fruit plentiful and bright as rubies shining in the trees, but it had been a long while -- the unicorn, in her sweet dream of eternal time, could not quite know how long -- since the last human virgin sought her counsel. It had been so long the word for unicorn with which she was acquainted could be recalled no longer by any living person.

The unicorn rarely had cause to reflect on the inelegant and noisy human animal, but gradually, gradually, as centuries slipped around her, she began to believe she had perhaps only imagined them, after all -- those girlets which walked barefoot by her, which dressed her in daisies and young roses and lay their yielding cheeks on her side, each of which she had valued very well in her inscrutable way -- and so it was droll to her indeed when, one day, it happened that two men with long bows rode into her forest, and she found it good to walk with them, out of sight in the thick shush of the thicket, to hear their odd hard sounds.

"I mislike the feel of this forest," grumbled the elder of the two hunters, a long, crooked man with an ugly face and cunning hands, who wore a wide hat, and drew his horse gently to pause.

"Why?" begged the younger, who was very young, indeed, small and shivering with energy, and as his companion initially offered no reply, he scoffed, "are you afraid?"

"Only fools have no fear," admonished the elder, looking pointedly at his charge, who withered only a little.

"What of?," the younger persisted, and his horse like himself was shuffling restlessly where it stood, and into the contemplative silence which responded he teased, "what monsters do you imagine exist any more? What is it you fear here, old man? Demons? Dragons?"

"More dangerous," said the elder, "the most beautiful creature that exists."

"Do nymphs live in these woods?" said the surprised youth, now looking about eagerly, and the senior hunter almost smiled.

"No nymphs, but a sentinel which stood by them at the dawn of the world. There is no game for us here."

He drew his horse up at the throat and she turned, and the wide-eyed youth followed uneagerly, and as they departed together through the path of shattered reeds the hunter spoke so low beneath the cacophony of the youths chatter only the unicorn, flowing through the wood unseen at his side, could interpret his words:

"This is no world for you any longer, poor beast. Good luck to you -- for you are the last."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i should go to jail

Looking at her face in the moonlit pool, her face which wore pale eternity like fine women wear diamonds, her face the very sun loved, the unicorn spoke the first words she had spoken since a previous empire; the sound of them alarmed her to leap in the water and shatter her image, and they were, "I am the last unicorn there is."

She wandered up the silver ribbon of river in a fugue through the prism within which immortals see suspended the world -- she wandered through the secret hours the soil slept and the stars simmered, she wandered all night to the boundary of her wood eventually into the meadow asylum in which, aeons ago, she had been born, and there in the sea-green dark of early morning resting on a throne of tall sunflower, almost asleep, a butterfly she did not know awaited her.

"She walks in beauty, like the night!," he greeted her, and she drew closer; she saw he was robust, a comely brindled brown, a widely smiling jovial soul with the queer cadence of speech the unicorn could not recognize as a highlands brogue, and like lepidoptera generally does, all he spake were snips of song which had once affected him. He had only one eye. He bowed reverently to the unicorn, and said again, "and what rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

The unicorn nodded, gravely, for she felt still disturbed, and listened to the butterfly serenaded her, "for I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

"To whom are you reciting?," wondered she, her sound like a white witchs broth of moonbeams and milk, and the butterfly murmured mirth, pitching hither and thither as though drunk. "Do you speak to me in this brazen way?"

"Dance and be merry, it's only a dime!," the butterfly sang.

"Why, do you know who I am?"

"You are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire..."

"Silly creature!" condemned the unicorn, exasperated and overextended -- shy though not humble, she felt the song of her should occur in her, not dripping from her teeth to curdle in the air -- "which affronts me when I am so sad..."

"Whenceforth and whither --"

" -- it isn't your concern," she admonished, "but I am wandering."

" -- and why?"

"I wander because I wonder -- I wonder if there is anyone left like me."

"I would sing on wanton wing when youthful May its bloom renewed..."

"It serves me right for speaking to you," said the unicorn, "I should be ashamed of myself to entertain such a nuisance -- such a little fool -- I should be ashamed to go so far from the place I know."

The butterfly lit upon her long snout, and she blinked at it -- his audacity impressed her, and she permitted him to stroke her nose, telling her soothingly, "All good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good."

"Well... I suppose you mean no harm." Though older than animals, she was, in fact, young for a unicorn, and the soil of her heart was yet too loose to support the roots of spite -- and the spray of the butterflys wings was so handsome, so good to look up at mutely shimmering in the new green light from where she was drowning in her face in the pool. "I forgive you."

She walked with him through the meadow clover and wildflower, to the crest of the tranquil scarlet sea of the sunrise, and she stood stolid though she rioted in her heart.

"Butterfly," she began, quietly, feeling silly, "I wonder..."

"I wonder why each little bird has a someone ..."

"... in your travels, have you ever seen anyone like me?"

For a time, the butterfly did not reply. He fluttered about her and seemed to dream.

"Listen," he said -- so she did -- "You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the bull ran close behind them."

"The bull? What is the bull?"

"His firstling bull has majesty, and his horns are the horns of a wild ox. With them he shall push the peoples, all of them, to the ends of the earth. Listen quickly..."

"I am listening," the unicorn assured him. "Where are my people, and what is the bull?"

The feints of the butterflies flight were deeper and slower, now, his voice somewhat softer, and he told her, "I have nightmares about crawling around on the ground."

So she left him at the meadow end, in the lips of a pink tulip where, shortly thereafter, and silently, he expired; meanwhile, the unicorn dithered a long time at the start of the road -- for unicorns are not intended to make choices.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> why am i doing this to myself

The unicorn ran for a while through the ruin of the world, and she saw things she never imagined -- she never guessed, for instance, that things such as cities had sprung up since she went into the underworld of woods, and the pock in the landscape of towers, tall walls, odoriferous rivers of middens and shit and clouds of human sound disturbed her so she was shepherded up the remotest ways through the world the prehistoric cunning of her blood recalled, encountering no human soul whatsoever for the brief, boisterous summer, the prolonged autumn and clement winter.

Spring came, with a ring and a pop of snowdrop, and she encountered one humid morning on a road beyond farmland a robust, bare-breasted and mustachioed man who stood in her path, approaching her slowly, trying to hide the leather bridle he wrung in his hands behind his back, and he crooned to her and called her "Bessie." She could not kill this sorry thing, but did kick him over as she fled that he might wake up with a little reverence.

The mans bad manner and odor followed her -- it was something she had forgotten, the self-importance of human men -- and perhaps she ran too hard from that unpleasant surprise, too far, too fast, for when she lay at last to rest in shade of the solitary chinaberry tree which beckoned her from the wooded wayside -- her bed in the meadowsweet where wrens and young hens gathered to witness her, brilliant in sleep as a new blue star -- when fireflies and starlight dispersed, when unripe sunlight spilled over the rim of the horizon and the crones carnival caravan clattered up beside her -- poor weary creature -- she did not stir.

So the crone, whose crown of black wire was infected with a pronounced streak of silver; the withered and wasted woman, beautiful like the pit of the new moon in her indigo gown, standing over the unicorn with opened, avaricious claws, and looking like death herself, spake:

"magician," addressing a flinching personage who attended her at her right arm, "what is it you see?"

"It is just a horse," replied the magician, uncertainly, "...a pretty little mare, fast sleep."

"Of course," laughed the crone, her laugh was like swinging swords or shooting stars, "of course, to an unenlightened eye, a horse is all she is. Fetch a length of chain from the train -- with good thick links -- we shall see if we can take this 'pretty little mare.'"

The magician did, and the witch herself -- for she was a witch, and an extraordinary one -- in her deep dark voice like sticky black entsblood emitting an arcane strain the apprentice magician standing nervously aside of her could not interpret -- the witch herself bound the unicorn, closing bonds on her four feet, and one on her throat, and weaving the iron chain, which was as thick as a farmers arm, between them.

When she stood to bid the magician bear the unicorn into the empty car at the end of the caravan, the magician saw she had installed behind the unicorns horn a pike of stark pale stone. It was like a cracked clay cast of woman standing beside Venus. He grimaced to see it -- to touch the unicorn, to heft the crescent moon caravel of her, her limp limbs which clattered together, fine as spiderstuff, he felt as if he would be dashed from the ordained plane of the waking world at any instant -- the trespass was so profound, he felt the insolence and unnature of it upsetting the axis of his bones

but he did, grimacing and writhing inside, but obediently, he did, and lay her very gently on the unclean slate floor of the car, locked the gate of iron bars which was its forward wall, and returned to the carriage at the start of the train to sit up beside the witch at the horses and he was very, very quiet.

The unicorn, young and soft, and having succumbed to a spell of exemplary strength, drifting in her misty and sun-dappled dreams perceived no evil, not until her cheek first found the confrontational cold of the floor -- not until her eye opened on the first wall she had ever seen, and she looked a long while, not understanding -- she saw a sunset, and the tide of countryside recede and settle, and on a wooly hill the caravan paused for the night she rose with the bearlight, coming to her feet as slowly as though she was just born, and looking hither and thither in fascination, and before the car, in barlight and Mars, the magician there stood.

He was tall and narrow, with articulate hands and the posture of a priest -- his face creased, his soberly short curls decayed white at the temples, his eyes behind his small round spectacles shaped by cutting cunning softened, somewhat, by the trepidatious and tender look he lent the unicorn.

"I know you," he said, "if I were blind, I'd know you."

"Please release me," beseeched the unicorn, and the magicians seemed sorrowful.

"Would I," he swore -- his voice was high, his accent strange, the vowels abrupt and blunt -- "you don't know the peril you're in! you don't know what can become of you if I make you inconvenient."

The unicorn, whose hooves disliked the poverty of purchase possessed by the silty slate to which she was confined, dithered and slithered and might have cried, had a unicorn the physiological faults of human women -- instead, she tottered to the bars, leaned hard on them and looked out and all about at her unhappy happenstance, and the poor magician, wringing his hands, narrated to her:

"it is a carnival. Do you know carnivals? It is a show -- a travelling show -- it travels to towns, to display interesting scenes to visitors -- ah, that is the satyr you spy."

"No, it isn't," said the unicorn.

"It is to visitors."

"It is an ape," she said, "a poor, old ape, with a stooped back, white in his face -- let him go!"

"Would I," sighed the magician, "would I." The unicorn could not understand.

"In the cage behind his" continued he, "you see the manticore."

"I see only a shabby lion with a turned leg. Why do you try to trick me?"

"Permit me," the magician began cautiously, "you may be unaware -- human people, generally, spend very little time in the truth; it is the reason, Madam, one finds oneself burdened by a superfluous horn."

The unicorn detected no disrespect and she made no reply -- a great still had passed over her, as thunderhead demurs horizon -- for she had seen the harpy -- the dark one -- Celaeno.

The harpy looked like a woman, a inoffensively pretty maid with ebony curls pinned up elegantly around her head, large eyes and a long white neck, but beneath her coiled an unholy body, a sinuous, muscular trunk from which bulbous, pendulous breasts swung, threaded with violet veinery and white as a washed corpse -- from her molted mottled belly crooked talons descended, grave hooks, greater than a mans whole hand, constantly flexing, anticipating, perhaps, mortal skin, soft as hot bread.

The harpy, roosted in her cruelly confining cage at the very front of the train, smiled sweetly at the unicorn -- what a pretty smile, cheeks pink as birthday cake, her tiny, flat teeth innocuously arranged in two neat rows like dutiful students -- to the unicorn, she looked exactly like the virgins which once wandered with her -- and the unicorn looked away as though she had seen something indecent.

"She should never have taken her," whispered the magician. "She should not have mistaken that one for a cheap carnival horror -- not that one -- it will have her in the end, mark my words, the harpy has nothing but time."

"So do unicorns," replied she.

The magician looked at her for a while, seeming very sad, indeed.


End file.
